Project: Walk Your City (Android)

Motivation:
Now a days people drive to their destinations, most of them unaware of the fact that the place is just a few minutes away. So, the question arises: 'Can we get people to walk more frequently?'. This very thought guided our client Matt Tomasulo to a new idea and he started with the 'Walk your city' campaign. Physical boards were installed at different places displaying the frequently visited and key locations along with the distance from the current point to reach there. This helped people in knowing how close actually their destination location is from their current location. Our application aims to give a technological boost to this idea.

How does this application work?:
The application is focused on guiding users and helping them out with the locations in North Hill- a mall present in downtown, Raleigh. Suppose we have a user, Adam, who had a coffee at the The Coffee Centre now wants to enjoy a good movie at the movie theatre. But Adam doesn't know how far the movie theatre is from the The Coffee centre. So, he opens our application and sees a list of destinations that are sorted in ascending order of the time required to reach them from The Coffee Centre. Nice, but Adam wants to see how far is the theatre without scrolling much through the list, really fast. So, our application serves his purpose; we have the places sorted based on the broad range of four categories: 'Amusement', 'Landmarks', 'Commerce' and 'Open Spaces'. So, Adam chooses Amusement and now the application displays only those places which lie in that category. So, basically he narrowed down his search to find the movie theatre listed in there, which says 'Its 10 minutes walk from The Coffee place'. Further, he can click on the list item to get walking directions on the map and the GPS tracks him as he walks to his destination!

This is what we intend to provide to the users- a simple yet a very intuitive interface where they can view their places of interest which are in a close proximity to their current location. We have color-coded the destinations based on the category they lie, which makes it even easier for the user to identify a specific location. Based on the categories, the users can then decide the destination they would like to walk and select it to further see walking directions to that place.

Scalability is another important aspect of this application. For this, we provide a web based interface to the administrator, using which he can add/update/remove locations which are dynamically reflected in the application.

This easy to use application would leverage people of North Hill greatly and reduce the dependency on vehicle to reach nearby places.